Wednesday, December 16, 2009

This is another of Chris Low's collection of tapes he has generously loaned me. The recording is not super amazing, but it's still great to get a feeling what a live industrial/EBM concert sounded more than 20 years ago. I think Chris recorded this by carrying a boombox into the venue. Check out the parties he's doing now.

Industrial and EBM music is having a bit of a moment now with parties like the Endurance party which has happened a few times at the Korsan Bar on Kingsland Road. We used to play some of this stuff at the Come parties we did back in 2008 in Dalston and I've been djing New Beat and industrial stuff for a while now cause the raw synth sounds are amazing. I like to pick the stuff that is slightly more poppy cause some of it can be a bit hardcore for the unitiated. Another track I really like right now is Fire by Dance or Die.

FYI, Douglas McCarthy did some projects recently with Terrence Fixmer who was a key part of the Electroclash scene on International Deejay Gigolo records, for those that remember.

Anyhoo, enjoy. I've ripped out a live version from this set of the track Hearts and Minds and also included the version off the album so you can compare. But pop over to itunes and buy the complete Belief album. This set was from different albums from 85-90 - my favorite era. Can you believe they started in 1983?!!

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

I have a lovely friend called Yasmina Dexter who writes the blog Pandora's Jukebox. She is also a fashion muse (meaning she works for and has her claws in a variety of unimpugnable fashion lights). She also djs as Pandora's Jukebox and on occasion has deigned to do so with me. Knowing that I have a thing for the little tapes she finally gave me a bit of a collection she has. Most them were made by her old flame DJ Quark, known by his mother as Jono and currently incarnated as Ping Specialist.

All I have ever wanted to be is a dj who can play all kinds of music together in a way that surprises and delights. So people always ask me what kind of music I play, and what I really want to say is, "Just lots of great stuff" rather than "house music" or "drone rock". Whether or not I can actually do that is a matter for history to decide. But Dj Quark actually mixes together an unusual but fabulous variety of oddities and rarities from trip hop to acid dub darkness beatz. I could only identify the Future Sound of London track on Side A. But DJ Quark helped me to identify a few of the other tracks. A number of them come from the Irdial label which had an interesting philosophy of putting its music out to download for free. You can read about Irdial catalogue here and find more to download here. One of their seminal artists, Insync's track Storm I have also made available for download below. Air Liquide is another great artist with a mix of ambient and acid sounds. And there's some really good slightly electronic dub from the Club Meets Dub compilation vol. 01 you can buy here.